Holiday gifts for the animals

It’s a time of giving at the National Aquarium. Each year around the holidays Aquarium staff members come together to build new enrichment toys for the animals. Animals, like people, need to play, exercise, and be creative each day. The animal care staff works hard throughout the year to think of new ways of making everyday materials into items that enhance the animals’ environments and stimulate their minds.

Last week staffers were busy working to finish the items in time for the holidays! At the end of the day there was a room filled with bird toys and perches from colorful wooden blocks and PVC pipes, reptile hides/caves from carpet, a play gym from hula hoops for the birds, new colorful hoops for the dolphins, foraging boards from turf and fleece for the tamarins, a sleeping nest from a barrel for the sloths, a new target poles for training the rescued sea turtles and more!

Visitors also had the opportunity to build enrichment items for their pets at home. Click here to learn fun and easy ways to enrich the lives of your pets at home.

Have any interesting ways that you enrich your pet’s environment? Please share with us!